


Requiem

by gloriouswhisperstyphoon



Category: Daredevil (Comics), Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 04:23:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16825072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloriouswhisperstyphoon/pseuds/gloriouswhisperstyphoon
Summary: Matthew Murdock has always been a fighter.His earliest memory is a hoarse whisper of his father into his ear as his child, a tiny and quiet doll in his arms struggles to breathe before finally letting the air flow into his lungs and letting out a triumphant scream.He’ll spend the rest of his life fighting.





	Requiem

Matthew Murdock has always been a fighter. 

His earliest memory is a hoarse whisper of his father into his ear as his child, a tiny and quiet doll in his arms struggles to breathe before finally letting the air flow into his lungs and letting out a triumphant scream. 

He’ll spend the rest of his life fighting. 

His memories of his father are all inextricably linked to boxing, watching him break his knuckles and his face in the ring and the gym. If he closes his eyes in the must of Fogwell’s, he can almost hear the loud thumping of a wrapped fist on a punching bag and the soft, high voice of a newly blind boy struggling to shut everything out of his new and terrifying world. 

It gets harder to shut it out after his father dies.

Every night, all he can hear is the sound of the gunshot that killed Battlin’ Jack echoing across the city, more orphaned sons screaming over the bodies of their fathers and everything and nothing and he just can’t shut it out. 

The only softness in his new world is the soft hand of a nun who comes by to hold him and comfort him back to his sleep. She comes by every night and she’s a brilliant gold flame in his world on fire and her voice is gentle. He never knows her name, but he knows what it means when she stops coming by and the nightmares just get worse. 

He’ll always be alone in life. 

But he’s a fighter, just like his father. 

So he takes the blows, and he rolls with it, and when a strange man comes to the orphanage, ready to train him and forge him into a weapon, he struggles to adapt to it as best as he can. 

Stick is gruff and coarse where his father was deceptively kind and the blows are harder than steel when they do land. But they gradually land less and the nightmares become less.

They’re never not there, but he can ignore them now. 

He still hears the screaming.

That will never stop. 

Matt Murdock is a fighter though. He never won’t be, so he decides to start fighting for something greater - something that might make the nightmares fade and let him sleep for once. 

So he does. 

He fights his way through a school system which isn’t designed for someone with as many issues as him and he fights his way into Columbia Law. 

It gets easier after that.

For a while at least.

Isn’t that how most things go?

He meets Foggy, a friend and kindred spirit, and he remembers what he’s fighting for every night, while he’s sleeping and trying to block out the noises. 

Secrecy has become ingrained in him now, though, as he hides who he is from Foggy.

_ Can blind people get the spins as well? _

_ Yeah.  _

His voice catches for a moment. 

He’s standing at a crossroads. 

To tell or not to tell. 

Tell or don’t tell. 

The moment passes and the opportunity leaves him.

He’ll never regret this moment more than the time that he’s laying on his couch, bleeding from half a dozen stab wounds which hurt and make his voice catch every time he tries to shift himself. 

The door shuts when Foggy leaves him, the noise echoing through his world on fire like a bullet. 

It hurts, the pain reaching deep inside him and leaving an empty void where his friend was. 

But he doesn’t give up. 

Matt Murdock is a fighter before he’s anything else. His blood sings when he’s in the middle of a fight, the ache in his knuckles grounding him to his reality. 

He can’t protect his friendships from his lies and his mistakes, but he can try and protect his city from the results of someone else’s lies and mistakes. 

Until he can’t. 

The world around him is cold and hard and it’s hard to see how it could get any worse. There’s no softness in his life any more.

He can’t be a half-measure, he tells himself as the world is crashing down around him. 

_ I’ve had a really shit day, Karen. The sort of day that makes you think that you’ve seen the worst of humanity and the pit just keeps getting deeper? _

It gets a bit easier after that. 

He fights better, not harder and he wins with both brains and brawns in a way that Jack Murdock would undoubtedly be proud of and he can see a life working out for him like this. 

More importantly, it’s not just him against the world. It’s more than that. 

He’s got someone who knows about his secret in Foggy and a woman who inspires him to be more than just a flawed and deeply mortal man in Karen. 

Until it doesn’t get easier and every move he makes feels like there’s a chain dragging him down. 

But he keeps going. 

It’s the least he can do, especially when Elektra comes back and sends his entire life into a tailspin and all he can do is just stand there and watch it burn. 

He keeps fighting, the way he always has, his fists aching with every punch. 

He tries to shove down the way that he starts to enjoy it, his lips involuntarily lifting into a smile with every punch and every man that gets knocked down as he starts to toy with them in a way that only Elektra could understand.

And then it ends.

Not with the Pearly Gates and Saint Peter, but with a dank basement and a stab wound in his side, as he holds Elektra tight, trying to will her to remember who she was and what she meant to him. He doesn’t see any bright light, though, just the darkness of the oblivion that he’s earned. 

And then he wakes up. 

It’s nothing but pain beyond that, as he keeps going and he keeps fighting, until the last moment and he can hear the sirens around the city as Wilson Fisk is led away and he can feel the cornerstone of something new being laid down. 

“To Nelson, Murdock and Page,” he says, holding up his drink and smiling properly for the first time in months at the people, feeling as if a weight has been lifted from his soul. It helps that his friends are finally happy to let him back into the fold, even despite the terrible things that he’s done. 

He’s still the Devil, but there’s more to him than just that. 

His grandmother always said that the Murdock boys had the Devil in them.

But after all, wasn’t Lucifer an angel once?

**Author's Note:**

> This is basically me being in mourning for Netflix Daredevil and everything it meant to me. 
> 
> Mostly though, I just needed this story out of my system before I write something better and longer.
> 
> But after all: “If a Devil is one who dares, when others hold back, then I am happy to play the Devil in this Mystery, boy.”


End file.
